Posts by Joe Wylie
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Polity: The overconfidence man, in reply to andin,
Key now has a media stacked to the gunnels with his cheerleaders.
Swine with mouths in the trough seems a more apt image
The more talented ones seem to be able to cheerlead, trough, and tug at their cuffs all at the same time.
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Polity: The overconfidence man, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
We collectively can push for better accountability. Everyone can help. No matter what preference of Party. If we treat the opposition as one instead of individual groups, the opposition will be a more powerful force.
Amen to that, though one would have to be Pollyanna personified to work the likes of Trevor Mallard into that. On a brighter note, the reincarnated David Shearer seems to have found his second wind. Lately you could almost believe that he and Greens global affairs spokesperson Kennedy Graham were on the same team.
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Polity: Gay marriage, weed, and death…, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
It now seems quite weird and old fashioned that Australia is the only anglophonic country to not have same-sex marriage.
The Hobart Mercury's Christopher Downes nails the weirdness.
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Access: Zero, in reply to Fiona Mckenzie,
Unless I'm sorely mistaken we've met, around 18 months ago, at the Upper Riccarton Library. It's not every time there's a queue for the book checkout that someone exceptional heads over and starts happily chatting. Memorable.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Danielle,
I dunno, it's just weird to go on about this one predictably rare hypothetical. Maybe by the time we get our dream abortion law the procedure can be outsourced to a robot or something!
Or things may have evolved to the point where beard-strokers and kiwi_guy-style fulminators can volunteer to carry hypothetical terminations to term in their own bio-enhanced bodies, with the transfer at minimal inconvenience to the mother.
I blame Saint Big Norm Mighty Totara for being such a shameless knuckle-dragger on social issues. If he'd seized the moment to take a similar initiative to Gough Whitlam I very much doubt that Muldoon would have reversed it. While Whitlam's powers didn't extend to the States, even Queensland had come on board with the Federal initiative by the end of the century. It's to our national shame that we're still having this wretched hypothetical "debate".
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Hard News: Campbell interviewed, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
...light and shade.
That beloved cliche of TV talent show judges of yesteryear. Then again, it may well be a phrase that Gavin Ellis honed to a fine edge in his time as editor-in-chief at the Herald.
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Envirologue: Swamp Monsters – the…, in reply to william blake,
And she wants to be prime minister?
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Envirologue: Swamp Monsters – the…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
slumber-jacking & loggerheads…
I see The Press has even weighed in on the matter –Has the Press's curtain-twitcher-in-chief seen the light and abandoned his recent streak of attempting to outdo Paul Henry at his own game? Whatever, there's still the trademark racist twist in the piece's final sentence.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There are cultures where children are not named until two years after birth because many of those babies will die - some of them because they were not fed because the family simply couldn't afford to feed another mouth. For most cultures that is a really extreme case - yet given the circumstances understandable.
Something I noticed from family histories was apparent siblings with the same name. I assumed there'd been some kind of error of transcription until I noticed that subsequent Johns, Charlottes, etc were replacements for those who'd failed to survive. It's a practice that seems to have carried on in NZ right up until around WW1.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
And mebbe read Roger Ruth and Me. Quick read, only $4 for the kindle version...
Ah thanks, that was easy. What with Rich of Observationz's David Graeber recommendation that's two trips to Amazon just from this thread.